Art is a universal language. Just ask second-year Camosun College Visual Arts student Cailee Seifried, who realizes that two people who don’t otherwise understand each other could gain meaning and connection from the colours they see in a work of art.
Seifried’s work will be displayed in On the Cusp, the year-end exhibit from Camosun’s Visual Arts grads. Seifried worked in abstraction for her piece in the exhibit, but she’s used to painting things like landscapes; she says it was a challenge to keep herself in an abstract frame of mind.
“You start to find images within the colours and it’s really hard to keep away from creating that image,” she says.
Works in the exhibit utilize a variety of mediums, from paint to clay to animation.
Non-abstract work has a specific subject to convey to the viewer; Seifried says she just kept adding paint to keep her mind from going to a place of traditional, non-abstract work.
“It was more about how the paint and the canvas interact and putting the paint on the canvas and less about having a subject matter,” she says. “The paint was the subject.”
Camosun Visual Arts chair Brad Muir says the show relies solely on the students, who, he says, are constantly on the edge of success, failure, knowing, and not knowing, hence the name of the exhibit.
“I have no place here without them,” says Muir. “There’s no future without them and there’s no past without them. I think that’s the exciting part for me, that every year we get to see the results of two years of hard, intense, focused, and sometimes unfocused engagement, where the end result is palpable.”
When it comes to creating art, it’s in the artist’s nature to stop when the art in question looks good, but Seifried says she just had to keep going with her work that will be displayed in the show.
“It was a lot of just accepting that I had to keep going, even though there was already a good painting—just keep adding to it,” she says.
Seifried says the Visual Arts program was a learning experience on how to let people in.
“I’m not an incredibly vulnerable person,” she says, “but the vulnerability in art kind of comes with it when you’re digging deeper into concepts.”
Seifried says that all her classmates were great people to open up to about the personal subject matter of art.
“It’s really easy to claim that what you’re making doesn’t have a personal connection and that it’s just a picture; often it has deep meaning and usually you’re compelled to make art… For me, it was a lot of personal experiences that got brought up, and it’s really hard to share those things with a room full of strangers,” she says.
Seifried says she feels that the Visual Arts program at Camosun is about figuring out who you are as an individual artist.
“It’s really important to figure out what your message is an artist if you’re trying to disseminate yourself through the community,” she says. “Get out there and have your art out, but it’s really hard to make people connect with your art if all you’re saying is that you’re just making it for the sake of making it.”
On the Cusp
Until Friday, May 4
747 Fort Street
http://camosun.ca/learn/programs/visual-arts/